There was a big thread on this some months back. I think most do not. I don't. I just do alcohol, boiling water and bore butter on the front half and cylinders. I do remove the nipples. The back half of the Colt clones just gets 100% alch rubs on the outside followed by bore butter. A teardown of the inner frame is too tricky to do after every shooting and liable to do more harm than good from what I can see.

What I do for my Colt is take the grips and brass trigger guard off which involves 6 screws then take the frame and submerge it into a bucket filled with hot soapy water. I brush the frame with either and old toothbrush or a brass bristle brush to get the gunk out. Then I spray the frame with liberal amounts of WD-40 and wipe clean. The barrel and cylinder and nipples are cleaned completely with the proper brushes and pipe cleaners to get the nipples. Only about once a year in the winter do I tear the guts out of the frame and clean the parts and screws. I’ve been doing that since around 1976 with no ill effects so I’m pretty confident it’s working out pretty well. But sometimes getting that hand "paw" back in is a real PITA.

Cylinder and barrel every time of course. Insides get done every 4 to 5 days out. And since they are typically used for my Cowboy Action events this means every 120 to 150 shots.

What I do is to make sure I don't overtighten the screws. I'd describe it more as "pinching" the screws or "snugging" them down. I check the main and frame screws once a day to make sure they aren't creeping out. They hardly ever need a tweak despite the low torque values I use. By doing it this way I can be sure that I'm not distorting the threads over a long term situation. There's also far less risk of the flat driver point coming out of the slot.

I pull the cylinder, scrub all the cylinders with hot, soapy water, dry, WD40. I don't pull the nipples, never had a nipple freeze up.

Then, I scrub the gun with the grips off it with hot soapy water, bore, anything I can get to. I dry, blow WD40 down the innards, put all back together. No complete strip, but I take the grips off and the cylinder out.

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